A joyously embellished and tightly guided epic fantasy thriller.
A fantasy debut sees a royal family under attack and a young prince who must defend the crown, his city, and civilization.
Prince Sillik, son of King Saldor, has been gone from Illicia for about seven years. Two months ago, he received a telepathic summons from his father implying an emergency. Sillik now approaches the city, which has “ruled the known world” for nearly 7,000 years. But on reaching home, he finds a sense of fear ascendant. He meets with his father’s principal advisers—Lady Briana, Lord Kenton, and Lord Gen. Greenup—and learns that Saldor is dead. Worse, Sillik’s three half brothers—Rendar, Crinthan, and Doran—have all been likewise assassinated. There’s no queen, because Sillik’s mother, Jenna, died during his birth, and he’s now the crown prince. Thankfully, he’s a Master of the Seven Laws, making him a formidable wizard capable of sensing the dark magic used to murder his father. He avoids a magical trap that someone placed on the throne itself and wonders whether his bitter uncles, Melin and Noswin, are involved in the chaos. When Sillik does learn who killed his father, and that the man escaped, he postpones his coronation. The prince is determined to track the murderer down. Clues found in the king’s dead hand—paper map symbols of the cities Colum, Nerak, and the Blasted Hills—point the way. Also deeply invested in the prince’s success is Lady Silvia, one of the Seven Gods of Law. If Sillik fails, the Council of Nine, which instigated the Demon War, wins. Opening a new series, the author is preaching the gospel of the genre. There are loving touches of the classics evident in the narrative’s every layer, from the political intrigue of Frank Herbert’s Dune to the vigorously structured culture in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern. The overarching theme of the positive number seven versus the negative number nine lends Cannon’s world a cosmic drumbeat that the characters dance to—and though it seems cloying at first, readers should grow to appreciate it as essential to the author’s vast arrangement. After intensive (and successful) worldbuilding, Cannon switches into thriller gear, and magical forensics factor in, as in the line “The energies from the duel still whispered discord. Fierce energies had been flung across the room and had eventually slain his father....Burned tapestries and melted stone showed how fierce the fight had been.” Characters possess the vibrancy to add to, rather than vanish within, a complex plot. Melin, concerned about Briana, loses his patience and asks the cool Sillik, “So are you bedding her or not?” And while a fantasy thriller filled with secret sects of killers among the healers would be fabulous, Cannon doesn’t settle for that. Sillik leaves Illicia to hunt for the king’s assassin, offering readers a broader scope. In the morally dank city of Colum, for example, the prince meets Renee, a charismatic, though guarded, woman battling injustice. Her appearance adds emotional depth to the finale while the epilogue is a triumph of detailed maneuvering that should entice audiences back for the sequel.
A joyously embellished and tightly guided epic fantasy thriller.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984511-67-6
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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